Just how divergent and ugly was the NCAA’s bracket?

Obviously, Sunday’s bracket was controversial. Beyond that, it can be difficult to quantify, to differentiate “questionable” from “bad.”

So here are a few statistics to throw out there.

I’m a participant in the Bracket Matrix, a group of bracketologists who submit their data throughout the process to be compiled and compared. There are 89 people involved; while I’m not going to vouch for the expertise of any individual member, I would say that all the major names are in there, and that in general, these folks put a lot of time into the process.

Many years, such as last year, plenty of people get the entire field correct (as in including the correct teams regardless of seeding). This year, a single participant, Jordan Schwartz of Fox Sports, got 67 of 68 teams and had the best Peymon Score at 331. Everyone else involved missed two at the least.

Of the teams on the bubble: Of the 89 members, a remarkable 87 selected Virginia Tech. 81 picked Colorado. 49 had Saint Mary’s.

The third-best bracket on the Peymon system still missed three teams, as I did. I was in the middle of the pack, 47th of 89. My Peymon score was 312; the average was 311.6. The omnipresent Joe Lunardi scored 310, missing three teams like so many others.

I may have further analysis later, but it’s safe to say that the committee was looking at something quite different from what I was when they selected USC over Virginia Tech. While no single team can feel that aggrieved to miss a 68-team field, the Hokies’ circumstances grow more distressing each year. His quotes to the Associated Press reflect the paranoia that comes with being overlooked four straight seasons:

“You almost wonder if someone in that room has their own agenda and that agenda doesn’t include Virginia Tech,” coach Seth Greenberg told reporters. “I totally wonder it, if someone in that room has an agenda. The explanation was so inconsistent with the result that it was almost mind-boggling. . . . What I’d like to know is if there’s ever been a team that’s won nine games in the ACC and played the non-conference schedule that we played and beat a No. 1 seed and still didn’t get in,” he said. “I’d love to see the research on that, No. 1, and No. 2, if there are teams in the tournament, that if you look at their non-conference schedule, beat no one. No one.”

There are also several untidy things about the bracket itself.

As many quickly noticed, and Chris Chase of Yahoo! analyzes here, there are two spots where the committee has set up Big East teams to play each other in the round of 32. Making that worse is that two of the teams are favorites, making Connecticut and Cincinnati likely rivals this coming weekend. With 11 Big East teams, three potential meetings in the Sweet 16 could not be avoided. But to have Round of 32 meetings between conference rivals breaks one of the most basic rules of bracketology, and could easily have been avoided (Chase calls the error “sloppy” and says it “took me three minutes of looking at the bracket to solve this problem”).

Another issue was that the 68 teams were ideally supposed to be divided evenly into brackets of 17. Wherever that rule fell on the hierarchy of “things not to do,” we wound up with a group of 16 and a group of 18. Mainly, this fouled up our pre-planned newspaper design, and probably had a similar effect on many people nationwide who were counting on this bracket to be common-sense.

In prior seasons, I’ve taken bracketology fairly seriously. But it’s difficult to take this process too seriously when the committee doesn’t follow its own rules.